Bright Eyes released a live EP compiled from their current tour in support of their latest, The People's Key. It's a limited release, only available through HMV. This live version of "Bowl of Oranges" must've been easy to do for their last tour, considering the pit of synths Conor Oberst was buried in. The lyrics also make a bold change. Instead of "That's why I'm singing 'baby,'" he switches that last word to 'Maria.'
Read the Mango Nebula review of The People's Keyhere.
Also, check out the star spangled video for "Jejune Stars" below.
Tracklist::
1. Firewall
2. Shell Games
3. Ladder Song
4. Arc Of Time
5. Bowl Of Oranges
6. Lover I Don’t Have To Love
Boy Without God's latest release is indeed hungry. Famishedly sparse like being surprised by a cold shower or getting your tongue stuck to a pole. Yet for all the gutteral atheistic wallows of songwriter Gabrial Burnbaum, there are quite a few feasting moments of vigor and depth. The album was recorded at the Soul Shop, mastered at Soundmirror, and even the jackets were made by Repeat Press for a whole homemade package. Get the album and a whole slew of Boy Without God's back-catalogue at their bandcamp.
Refried Ice Cream should now be well associated with Bright Eyes, as frontman Danny Brewer contributed the eerie and apocalyptic love espousing spoken word genesis recorrections to The People's Key. And yes, their music is just as odd and interesting. Witness to the Storm is the tenth album out by the father son Texas duo and first release on Team Love, the label started by Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst and Nate Krenkel. Time could be wasted trying to explain the 1970's in dimension X sound or saying that the Roky Erikson inspired style that verges on Jandek greatness, but what describes the band best is a nice little story blurb on the Team Love website that you can read below. The group is quite politically conscious as well, in their lyrics and on their website, which is like a late nineties free webpage creator disaster and is thoroughly entertaining to explore.
"It was 109 degrees on the ground the afternoon we flew into El Paso. I could see the dust rising in angry swarms from the flat restricted zones of Fort Bliss while the murder capital city out the window on the other side of the aisle was like an extremely sick and overweight sister I never had who had grown so obese she could no longer rise from the couch and dip her ankles into the Rio Grande.
I had heard from the boys in the Mystic Valley about a father/son rock band somewhere to the east of El Paso near Tornillo or Fabens. They were outsiders from another time, an old man with a Harley engine for a heart and his son with an apple pipe affixed to his lips. They had a sound that had turned off Interstate 10 somewhere around 1971 and never looked back, crushing the Texas mountain laurel and hollyhock with amphetamine laced VU riffs that drone on ad infinitum in search of buried gold and healing waters. It was under the shade of an almond tree that I finally met Refried Ice Cream.
Denny had injured his back repairing a motorcycle and his son Josh kept reiterating the importance of good health. They sipped ice water and spoke of far away things, of dimensional parasitic races and amputated feet that grew back. They had driven over from their compound that was a bastion of priceless guitar amps and discarded metal detritus, where Janis Joplin’s car and a brand new Imac shared the same plot of dust with a family of hippie lizards and a caldron of extinct moeritherium stew. Like their music, their conversation leapt from the drone of linear time to the heights where the human psyche cracks and the blue-sky floods in, from a simple government plot to control the populace, to an eternal quest for a bottle from god’s private stash.
When our time together was over my faith lay shattered and scattered among the empty beer bottles was a copy of, as Josh described, their latest series of jams, their new album, “Witness To The Storm.” The first song gave me the impression I was pinned to the underside of the engine hood of a flaming red Super Bee. Effects were catching fire and dripping from the cymbals as Denny sang in what I soon realized was his patented style of lazy cool repetitive and repeating six shooter slow draw, and then came Josh with his rants of mind control and poison in the well. After the third song I looked up and took notice that we were on the banks of the Rio Grande. George Bush’s wall was before us hot to the touch and already broken out in rust and decay. A lightening storm danced across the sky horizontally but offered no respite from the heat. Only in this climate, in these times, could music that expressed the both the power of the psychedelic landscape, the paranoia of the dying world and the glory of speed and thirst that comes from years of driving on two lanes under an enemy sun be made.
After El Paso I was never the same. I carry with me now an expression that says to other like minded outsiders and collectors of the strange and sublime, do you see what is on my face, have you heard this sound, do you know what I mean when I ask for it Refried?" -Napo K. July 2010
The Girls track "Vomit" was released today. Listen to it below. Their new record Father, Son, & Holy Ghost will be out Sptember 13th on True Panther Sounds.
Tracklist:
01 Honey Bunny
02 Alex
03 Die
04 Saying I Love You
05 My Ma
06 Vomit
07 Just a Song
08 Magic
09 Forgiveness
10 Love Like a River
11 Jamie Marie
boniver.org
It would be a near impossible challenge for Bon Iver to make an album with more mystique than For Emma, Forever Ago's bearded lumberjack in a cabin in the woods cutting down trees with an acoustic guitar. However, the new self-titled record plays with a lot more possibilities for the name and is actually one of the only instances when making an album self-titled is acceptable, because it serves a purpose. The album travels around the country a bit, although it does still stick mostly to the mid-west. Similarly, the sounds and structures explore quite a bit of new territory, while never straying too far from the cabin in the woods. It does a good job of redefining Bon Iver, experimenting quite a bit and even dropping the falsetto a few times. A good example of Bon Iver's diverse capabilities is "Minnesota, WI." The record doesn't quite have the inherent majesty of the first and loses a few points for rehashing an 80's nightmare on the last track "Beth/Rest."
Check out the video for "Calgary" below.
The lyrics also define a well developed poetic style unique to Bon Iver. He uses words that aren't that common and form a new lexicon, because they're all similar in some way (probably in majesty). Words that seem sort of out of place in the context, but push onward like a baby or an animal unable to understand its surroundings and just accepts them to succumb to the flow of time. Its all almost like a secret language. The word bank includes: "fane," "furling," "gamut," "Hmong," "onus," "Noachide," "morass," "hawser," and "soffit" (I don't need to link, you know how to use google right?). Bonus points for good vocab (I think I read on one blog somewhere something like: "passages that would give a freshman writing TA heart palpitations."). And some words he made up, like "arboretic." Words that are perplexing, but their sound gives a jist of meaning. The arbor part lined up next to "truth," gives a apple in the garden of Eden vibe. Considering the rest of "Minnesota, WI"s references to scripture and kneeling, the "arboretic truth you kept posing" conjures a scene of someone in a suit, talking religion to singer Justin Vernon in some dusty annex in the middle of the thick northern woods.
But goddamn it, is that last song kitsch in the worst way.
To celebrate the fourth of July, I bring to you "Don't Know When, But a Day is Gonna Come" by Bright Eyes live at Coachella in 2004. It's a perfect song for the day, because it's full of explosions and patriotism!
jamesblakemusic.com It took me a while to post this album, because the first few times I heard James Blake I hated it. The EPs that preceded this album received rave reviews, but seemed like a nightmarish mess of noises, cliched 80's synth, and regurgitated hip hop and R&B tropes. Even when I heard the debut LP, I was quick to judge it as lacking imagination, but I wasn't looking at it the right way. James Blake's first release is an extreme experiment in minimalism, like a Rothko painting or a frame filled in with just one color that you have to take a course in art history to understand why it's hanging in a museum.
Videos for "The Wilhelm Scream," "Lindisfarne," and "Limit to Your Love" below.
Most songs repeat one line over and over again with a void of space in between the words and keys. For example, the third track is five minutes of "My brother and my sister don't speak to me, but I don't blame them." The repetition becomes the singer torturing himself with guilt over and over again, quickly peaking in some electrified sci-fi synth that overpowers the words. In a clever little bit of morose comedy, the song is called "I Never Learnt to Share."
One of the most interesting parts of the album are the songs "Lindisfarne I & II." Both songs share certain lyrics and both are vocally modified, but the first part doesn't feature any instruments. The breath of the song in the spaces between the words surprisingly fills it well. It's two ways to tell a strange tale about a crime, buses, beacons, birds (kestrels), guns and cute girls. Lindisfarne is an island off the eastern coast of England and is called the "Holy Island." Apparently, the name is old English for the island of "travelers from Lindsay."
James Blake has been compared to Bon Iver a lot, but that's garbage. For Emma, Forever ago was more about acoustic simplicity than minimalism. Perhaps they do share a similar depth of self-torturing emotion, but James Blake is closer to Daft Punk than anything else.
On the album, James plays around enough with his style that the repetition doesn't get boring. "Unluck" is one of the most diverse songs on the record, to ease the listener in as the first track. "I Mind" just warbles the title in one long breath. You even have your traditional piano James Blake for a track on "Give Me My Month." After a few listens, the melodies even get pretty addictive.
Tracklisting ::
01 Unluck
02 The Wilhelm Scream
03 I Never Learnt to Share
04 Lindisfarne I
05 Lindisfarne II
06 Limit to Your Love
07 Give Me My Month
08 To Care (Like You)
09 Why Don't You Call Me
10 I Mind
11 Measurements
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